By about 3 a.m., I figured I wasn’t in a sleeping mood. Usually that’s when I call on Wodehouse or Chesterton, something light and cheery. But I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, and the only book within arm’s reach was the selected Arthur Machen. So, The Great God Pan was my bedtime story.
Pan is one of those horror-stories that, at first glance, didn’t age well. When it was first published in 1894, it was considered so dreadful that it nearly ruined Machen. Wikipedia put me on to an essay by Harry Quilter called “The Gospel of Intensity”, which is a perfect Victorian broadside against the horror genre. Quilter also has a go at better-known writers—Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, for one—but seems especially repulsed by Machen:
The Great God Pan is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared in endeavour to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words.
What’s funny is that modern readers, on the contrary, would find Pan too subtle. There are strong hints at sex, but nothing remotely explicit. Take, for example, this exquisitely crafted passage:
One evening. . . after Rachel had come home, her mother heard a noise which sounded like suppressed weeping in the girl’s room, and on going in found her lying, half undressed, upon the bed, evidently in the greatest distress. As soon as she saw her mother, she exclaimed, “Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest with Helen?” Mrs. M. was astonished at so strange a question, and proceeded to make inquiries. Rachel told her a wild story. She said—
Clarke closed the book with a snap, and turned his chair towards the fire. When his friend sat one evening in that very chair, and told his story, Clarke had interrupted him at a point a little subsequent to this, had cut short his words in a paroxysm of horror.
Machen leaves it to us to fill in the details. But can we? I’m not so sure. I think we lack the imaginative powers.
This is why I say literature cannot coexist with TV and film. Too much “watching” makes us incapable of reading. We become like children who’ve never learned how to feed ourselves. We need directors to spoon-feed us all the sights, the sounds, the feelings, the whole atmosphere.
And if this is true of anyone, it’s true of me. Like I said, I was struck that Quilter criticized Pan for being too explicit. I love Machen, but, if anything, I found the story underwhelming. It just seemed too shy.
Truth be told, I’ve felt this disconnect with all of my favorite novelists. (The one exception is Tolkien, but that’s another story.) I’m not picking up what they’re putting down, as the kids would say. And I don’t think I’m alone here.
Take another example. I’m a big fan of the series A Ghost Story for Christmas. Most every year since 1973, the BBC has adapted some haunting classic by M. R. James. Most of them are terrific. Yet they all “show” a great deal more than James’s story “tells.” We actually see Dr. Rant’s shade in The Tractate Middoth (2013) and Gawdy’s wraith in The Mezzotint (2021).
And here’s the thing. James rarely describes the creatures in his stories—but, for the most part, his characters don’t see them, either. His ghosts and ghouls lurk mostly in the shadows. The narrator might catch a fleeting glimpse—but only from a high window, out of the corner of his eye. And so he, too, is left to fill in the blanks using his imagination. Often enough, that’s exactly what drives him mad. It’s not what they saw, but what remains unseen.
That’s also the fun of a ghost story. At least, assuming you’ve got an imagination. Which I don’t think most of us have.
What’s striking is that most of us probably trend in the other direction. Hollywood has completely desensitized us to horror. As someone who grew up watching classics like It and Silent Hill and The Grudge, it scares me how little those films now scare me. Yes, the rational part of my brain knows I’m looking at something that should cause fear, anger, and disgust. But I don’t get the same visceral reaction I did when I was ten. To quote the late, great Gordon Lightfoot: “The feeling’s gone, and I just can’t get it back.”
I wish I could get it back—and not so I can get really spooked by James’s ghost stories. Reading Quilter’s essay, I realized that my brain is defective. I don’t experience reality the way a healthy, well-adjusted human being ought to. And it’s not because I suffered any trauma. It’s not because I’m especially brave. I’ve just watched too much television.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “You wouldn’t feel so ‘desensitized’ if you had to watch someone saw off their own arm in real life.” Well, obviously. But, still, something inside of me has changed. I remember when I was a teenager, and I was still feeling my way around the internet. Somehow, I found a video of two teenagers beating a homeless man to death. I watched the whole thing, and then cried for hours. Would I be moved the same way today? Nope. Not a chance.
Again, I’m not the only one in this boat. We don’t realize how much of our humanity we’ve already lost. In fact, most of us think we’ve become more “humane.” And that scares me to death.
Take another example from The Great God Pan. Quilter singles out a particular passage for abuse—when Helen Vaughan (the antagonist) dies, and her body undergoes a bizarre transformation:
I saw the form waver from sex to sex, diving itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained, while the outward form changed.
The reader has spent the whole story believing that Helen is an evil seductress. Now he find that she’s both male and female at the same time—and, at the same time, neither. When Pan was first published, this sexual dimorphism was considered a major theme. Aubrey Beardsley was asked to draw up the title page for the first edition (which I used as lead image of this post), and he chose a simple motif: an androgynous, wicked-looking faun.
This really got Quilter’s goat. “Who can wonder even at the nasty little naked figure of dubious sex and humanity with which [Beardsley] has prefaced the story—in all truth a most fitting introduction.”
Looking at Beardsley’s faun, I couldn’t help but think of a certain topless photo of the “trans-male” actor Elliot (née Ellen) Page. The snap shows Page by the pool. She has six-pack abs, but no biceps or triceps. There are faint scars beneath her undefined pectorals, showing where the surgeon entered her chest to perform a double mastectomy.
I don’t mean to demean Page in any way. But if you look at photos of her before and after her “transition,” you shouldn’t only be disturbed: you should be revolted. The mutilation of the human body, whether voluntary or involuntary, should always be disturbing.
This is another point that struck me. For the Victorians—as for the huge majority of the human race—any kind of gender-bending was seen as, not only unnatural, but revolting. Drawings of androgynous fauns are small peanuts compared to a real-live “post-op trans-man.” And yet, after The Human Centipede, how can we be shocked by… anything?
(NOTE TO READERS: If you’ve never heard of The Human Centipede, don’t look it up. Seriously, don’t.)
This is the world we live in now. Nothing is frightening because everything is frightening. Nothing is grotesque because everything is grotesque. Nothing disturbs us because we’re all deeply disturbed. There’s no such thing as “horror,” because nothing is left to the imagination.